( Excerpt from: Something Old, Something New )

Busy week this week which is good, but the poor ol’ devlog kept getting pushed back. Generally I aim for Thursday evening, but found Friday’s were when I was most likely to do one, and I was fine with it sliding to Saturday, since I could try to get into a ‘Screenshot Saturday plz wishlist’ kind of routine.

One of the big, positive reasons this week was so busy came from doing a huge swath of replacing temp / placeholder / borrowed assets in order to share screenshots that are entirely rough original temp placeholder assets. Wouldn’t want someone to get it in their mind ‘this is the second coming of Maniac Mansion’ only to disappoint them.

In the middle of all that, I took a short detour to finally address the TODO List item “Add Retro / CRT Filter to Project?” honestly expecting to push it to 2.0 many months down the road. The issue is; I love retro shaders / screen effects so much, I can easily spend hours just tweaking them, trying different areas, saving screenshots, etc.. etc.. So if I determined it just wasn’t practical drop an asset in and be done with it, delaying it would be a ‘win’

However… There are the wins where, ‘The asset almost immediately works, but causes a fatal error with Git due to some CRLF line ending reason but actually seems more like too long path name, and suddenly I’ve done about 2 hours of troubleshooting, removing and re-adding the asset, and finally just committing each folder separately only to find the error was… Magically fixed during the process?

I don’t love it when things start working without clearly understanding the reason why, but at this point I’ll accept it and move on!

World Genre

One of my favorite ‘tropes’ is the “Our science has discovered mystical thing, and our science fails to control mystical things!” partly because it taps into my favorite “Oh geez, I didn’t prepare, and because I didn’t prepare I’m doOOoooOOOomed!” angle of terror, as well as allowing both science & mystical things to occur in the story – like a genre buffet!

There is a caveat though; while I’m into the “Mystical thing is actually an undiscovered science.” I’m not a fan of “We thus immediately know how to solve problem with one line of science, and it just works.” In my gut, the solution shouldn’t be without effort or trial & error and only immediately working first try when there’s some kind of luck reason for it. “Happy accidents” are also an exception.

But seriously, if an ancient cosmic deity phases through the the ether to destroy a city block and your plucky intern solves it in one like like ‘It’s frequency is 440, so we just have to play a counter frequency and cancel it out!’ either the intern should be running the place, or the folks running the place should be fired.

While exploring the antagonists mansion the player will ideally feel like it’s a wild science affair, but slowly encounter more mystical and hard to explain things. Eventually it might encourage them to ‘try everything on everything’ if there’s too much conflict with the genre and that isn’t great, but hopefully ‘the next solution’ is never as obscure or prolonged so much that the play gets irritated or bored.

• Step 1 – Evaluate and plan approach.
• Step 2 – Learn the ‘rules of the world’
• Step 3 – Knowing the ‘rules’ proceed and succeed!